Knowledge and Social Networks
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| Echo hears the truth. |
I live in a bubble bounded by walls and a moving horizon, limited within those bounds to what I've focused on and remembered. Besides whatever intuitions may be hard-wired in the human mind (and research doesn't allow dismissing that), I know nothing but what I have seen, heard, tasted. smelled and touched.
So how do I know that the earth circles the sun or that China exists? How did I acquire the furniture of my mental world? Most of it is a gift from authority. It comes from a parent, a teacher, an expert, a magazine, a book, a signpost, a television screen, a friend, or a website. Some of these I believe, some I doubt but don't wholly dismiss, and some I dismiss as disinformation. My Ph.D. may have conditioned me to think more critically than most people, but my information-sorting still runs on mostly on automatic. I annoy friends with detailed analysis, but I'd fall on my face if I analyzed every step I take across the floor. Most experience defies analysis. We have to go with the gut.
I recently watched Joseph H. Shieber's Theories of Knowledge: How to Think about What You Know, twelve hours of lecture on epistemology, or how we arrive at (or try to arrive at) justified belief. Shieber moves toward a fallibilistic synthesis. Justified belief, as he understands it, is never equivalent to "truth," though it should approach that ideal.
Shieber rejects foundationalism, which is associated with Rene Descartes and has roots in medieval Scholasticism and Greek philosophy--the Euclidian method of constructing proofs from self-evident principles. There simply aren't axioms enough to prove everything we need to know even if our minds worked that way.
Another promising but failed method is coherence, the idea that a belief is true if it harmonizes with a system of other beliefs. Coherence, like geometric proof, is surely a virtue, but it's possible to construct a coherent set of falsehoods, and coherence blocks out surprising new information. The ancient earth-centered astronomical system with its crystalline spheres and ad hoc epicycles was for centuries more consistent than the sun-centered system, but that didn't make it more true.
John Locke dominated western thought for two centuries with his view that all ideas originate in sense data. However, from such disparate sources as Jung's Collective Unconscious, Evolutionary Psychology, and Paul Bloom's recent research on morality in infants, it's clear that Locke was wrong in believing we begin with a tabula rasa or blank slate. We're born with a cognitive operating system preinstalled. Still, our primal OS--operating in the early years that are lost to memory--is activated by definite sensory content. Any substantial beliefs derive from experience, however naturally predisposed we may be to that experience. Beliefs we can put into words are configured by some kind of sensory input, either our own or that of other people.
St. Augustine distinguishes between things we know personally and things we must take on faith, arguing that most knowledge derives from authority. I know of the existence of London, England, because I have been there, but I do not know of the existence of London, Ontario, where I have never been, but only believe based on my faith in authorities, for instance, in Google Maps and a Canadian I met. For Augustine, the principle authorities are Neoplatonic philosophy and Christian scripture, and these remained authoritative in Europe, with a shift of emphasis toward Aristotle, until the scientific revolution crowned by Isaac Newton.
Augustine argued that submission to the limits of personal knowledge confirms truths like the Trinity, but, for most thinkers, the ground has shifted since then. Today, we emphasize the authority of rational analysis of sensory experience (science) over the authority of ancient books, but we still live in worlds populated, outside of our narrow horizons, by faith. My belief in the existence of London, Ontario, is still faith-based.
Of course, the question is which authorities to take on faith. Shieber concludes that we inherit belief-systems more-or-less intact from "networks" around us. I adopt the ideology of my extended social network, whatever it may be. My belief-system certainly can change, maybe in revolutionary ways--what is called conversion--but at any given time, it reflects the sum all of my influences, most of which are beyond my personal ability to critically evaluate. This makes sense as a method for processing more information than any one person can have access to, seeing over personal horizons. In contrast to ancient and medieval times when a brilliant and studious person, like Goethe's Faust, could master all fields of learning, today knowledge is morselized into subfields within fields and specializations within those. With respect to Covid-19, for instance, virologists must trust epidemiologists and geneticists, and vice versa, all of whom are useless without the expertise of manufacturers, physicians, and politicians.
In graduate school, I learned the effectiveness of such a system--building on authorities whose work I didn't have the resources to repeat. I learned to accept translations from languages I couldn't read, for instance. Knowledge is a community project. Faith in the authority of an international academic community--the consensus of accredited experts--tends to be conservative, which is a bad thing when it inhibits progress, but it also conserves and applies probabilistic knowledge, which is good. Peer-reviewed research citing peer-reviewed sources--like multi-sourced, fact-checked professional journalism--can't guarantee truth, but it is still the most reliable kind of social network to put our faith in. It is the best way to form justified belief, truth's first cousin, which is the goal of epistemology.
The problem is that many of our beliefs are formed from social networks that that are poorly regulated, that aren't reliable sources. Sixty years ago, most of my information came from face-to-face contacts or edited sources such as radio news, books, newspapers, and national magazines, but the Internet has created the problem of raw, non-expert claims dumped into social networks and going viral. At its inception, the Internet inspired optimism--hope that a free market of ideas would serve truth, or, at least its first cousin. Bypassing gatekeepers such as editors, I run this blog up the flagpole to see if anybody salutes, and that kind of free market of ideas (as I developed in my post on John Milton's Areopagitica) is traditionally supposed to promote truth (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/05/blasphemy-and-freedom.html). But, while a free press may safeguard against tyranny and be (as Churchill said about Democracy) the worst system except for all of the others, on Facebook and Twitter, sensational garbage floats to the top. Provocative headers beat drab fact. Wild claims draw attention. It's all about clickbait, not truth.
Augustine's conversion is easily understood as acceptance of authority--the equivalent of my believing peer-reviewed researchers. Catholicism was the faith not only of his saintly mother, but of the Roman Emperor, and was intelligible in terms of Neoplatonism, the dominant school of philosophy. But today, unless you retreat into the echo chamber of one faith, stopping your ears against sounds from outside, there is no single voice of religious authority. It is a cacophony. Of course, if you've committed to a single faith and aspire to achieve its goals by following its instruction, given that cacophony yields no instruction, you may deliberately retreat into a society of co-believers.
But, in a cacophony, how do you decide which echo chamber to retreat to? You might pick the nearest one or stay in one where you were born, but that's irresponsible if we want justified true belief. Maybe any port in a storm, but in fair weather, how is a given port justified? Given a smorgasbord of beliefs--a coast of ports, a corridor of echo chambers, a cacophony of voices--all claiming authority, we can only appeal to personal experience or the experience of someone whose testimony we are moved to trust, and both of these take us down a rabbit hole of subjectivity, into experience buried within an experiencer. I recall a hymn about Jesus from my Baptist childhood: "You ask me how I know he lives. He lives within my heart." We tend to believe our own subectivity. Augustine writes in his Confessions that he accepted the authority of Christian scripture (later becoming the chief authority on its interpretation) with two mystical experiences.
A ongoing dispute over the validity of religious experiences began in the 17th century with the disbelief in the authority of Aristotle and the Bible. The new Deistic God (the one in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence) is supposed to have created a perfect orderly universe and, like a watchmaker, now reveals himself only through its operations, through unchanging physical and moral law. Such a God does not inspire scripture, work miracles, or answer prayers. If you want to know him, study physics. Deists dismissed religious experience as superstition, even madness. As 20th century science accepted the idea of self-ordering systems, design without a designer, belief in the watchmaker God gave way to agnosticism. Bertrand Russell put it famously: "From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes."
Of course, as great as "a scientific point of view" is in its ability to unite people of all cultures around physical realities (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/10/kalashnikov-truth.html), it leaves out the particulars, not only of religion, but of art, culture, and human relations, which are based on echo chambers conditioned by interior urges. Here we fall back on one form or another of the slogan, "If it feels good, do it." There can, of course, be terrible consequences of doing what feels good in the short term--misery, injustice, and early death--but, if etherial feel-goods of religion avoid such dire effects and promote health and security, it may be justifiable to choose a religious authority that feels good, or that best comports with subjective experience of the Good.
Sources
Russell, Bertrand. "Mysticism" from Religion and Science. https://scepsis.net/eng/articles/id_4.php
Shieber, Joseph H. Theories of Knowledge: How to Think About What You Know. The Great Courses, 2019.
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